O Say, What Is Truth?-Is It Green or Blue?
Revisiting my Entry into Latter-day Saint Hymnody
by Ron Simpson
There was no way.
She was nice enough about it, but Sister Andrus was determined that three of my buddies and I were going to learn all four men’s parts and sing like a quartet in Church. She was a determined ward music chair and just doing her job, but we were California teenagers-at the absolute top of our cool-and there was just no way she was going to get us to stand up in a sacrament meeting and be a male quartet. Not to celebrate the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood or to announce a five per cent tithing fire sale, not for any reason-no way.
Of course we underestimated Sister Andrus. It wasn’t even a fair fight (four of us against one of her), because she had gone to our folks before talking to us and it was more of a done deal than a matter of choice. Finally we began to figure out that if we accepted our fate and threw ourselves into the task, then rehearsals would go fairly quickly and we could turn our attention back to real life.
And so we sang “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go,” and our moms looked as proud as if they’d won the Pillsbury baking contest. But there was something else: beneath our requisite teenage protestations, we discovered we kind of liked singing together, we realized we sounded pretty good, and we gradually toned down our negative comments, secretly hoping they’d ask us again sometime.
Soon someone suggested we try “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” and we sang it earnestly, not really understanding the meaning of the refrain, “Let the lower lights be burning,” but feeling the tradition of Salvation Army zeal through the rich memorability of the music, and then when we were juniors or seniors in high school we tackled what turned out to be the king of all the men’s arrangements in the old blue hymn book: “O Say, What Is Truth?” By the time we had worked our way through the unexpected chromatic details in the arrangement, we discovered that if we sped it up a little it would take on a bit of a lilt, and yet still be appropriate for sacrament meeting.
“O Say, What Is Truth?” became a personal discovery for me: how could someone-I had no idea who-turn a fairly typical hymn, with what seemed to me weird poetic words, into something so exciting to sing? I began to think how great it would be to create arrangements like that, and indeed I began to put some ideas of my own on paper. “Abide with Me; ‘Tis Eventide” I coaxed from its traditional triple meter into 4/4 time, and the spiritual “Were You There” seemed to invite all sorts of wonderful chromatic treatments to an eager young arranger. And gradually I began thinking about a music career.
Just a few years later, by now immersed in a music-major curriculum, I was seated in my theory class at BYU and composer Robert Cundick-a brilliant teacher and mentor-was discussing elements of tasteful arranging. As his closer that day, he pulled out my beloved “O Say, What Is Truth?” and proceeded to take it apart. All my favorite passages he considered to be over the top.
It was perhaps the first of many little philosophical collisions I would have with some of my most admired musical friends and mentors. I whispered a silent bit of gratitude that the male voices arrangement of “O Say, What Is Truth?” was solidly in the hymnbook and couldn’t be torn out even though Dr. Cundick might believe it didn’t measure up.
A few months went by and I happened onto a rehearsal in the old Joseph Smith Building at BYU. They were working on Robert Cundick’s setting of the poem “The West Wind” for male voices, and I realized this was music for male voices at a whole new level of power. I began to grasp what he’d been teaching us.
A lifetime later, it’s 2002, and in my Church calling, I’m responsible to provide music for a BYU student stake priesthood meeting. We find some willing male singers, but then the conductor, also a student, says, “But what should we sing? It’s too late to buy anything.” Something clicks in my head and I remember being their age. I ask, “So, is ‘O Say, What Is Truth?’ still in the hymn book with that male voices arrangement?” The director nods yes, and we settle on it.
At the stake priesthood meeting, I’m enjoying a bit of anticipation, wondering if I’ll still get excited by the same “good parts” that my buddies and I used to relish singing. But the song goes by without incident, and I realize that in the “new” green hymnal, the male arrangement of “O Say, What Is Truth?” has been pasteurized, homogenized, made bland.
I think about it for a long time. What has happened? On one hand, I know and agree with the guideline handed down by Elder Packer and others that we (musicians) should choose music for worship that “doesn’t call attention to itself.” This version certainly hadn’t.
On the other hand, they’ve removed the one arrangement that, more than any other single piece, had led me into Church music, had made me eager to study, to want to devote much of my life to it. Without exposure to that one particular song at just the right impressionable time, I wondered if, instead of music, I might have followed my other career ideas and become an automotive design engineer or an architect (or the proprietor of Honest Ron’s Used Cars).
Finally, still unsettled, I even telephoned Bob Cundick, whose title is now Temple Square Organist Emeritus, and who was centrally involved in the revision of the LDS hymnal in the 80s. Today, in his retirement years, he is still an active composer and a tireless promoter of new sacred and other serious music, and we frequently work together on recording projects.
But he says he doesn’t recall any issues he may have had with the original male arrangement of “O Say, What Is Truth?,” nor, says Bob, can he recall who wrote that original arrangement, though when he lectured in class, he talked about it as if the arranger had been an acquaintance, a colleague, a contemporary of his.
I’m disappointed. I would still want to say thank you if the arranger were still alive, to explain how, more than any other single piece of music in LDS hymnody, that arrangement hooked me at a most important time.
And I’m thinking-in the somewhat hyperbolic vocabulary of “O Say, What Is Truth?”-that for me the original male-voices arrangement was like “the costliest diadem,” a diamond I couldn’t live without, even though subsequently it would be pulled, apparently deemed-at least in some quarters-to be “dross and refuse.”
Okay, enough of this. But just to preserve this piece of my personal musical odyssey and to let you compare the arrangements, and to see how tame this whole discussion really is, I tracked down one of the old blue hymnals. So here they are: the old (339) and the new (331). What do you think? Green or blue?
It’s definitely easier being green, but I still get more from the blue.
2003 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
